Day in and day out. Garbage in,
garbage out.
The working life of a San Francisco garbage collector is unrelenting --
five days a week, sometimes six, they're out there early in the morning,
stopping and starting the truck, humping 100-pound bags full of everyone
else's trash.
``It's an embarrassing job,'' said Chuck, as he stood near a picket line
yesterday. Chuck is one of the 500 garbage workers whose strike was settled
last night. ``You've got trash loaded on your back, and you're walking
past people at a bus stop and they look at you with all that stink on your
back. And, well, it's their garbage.''
Many of the striking drivers and helpers, who make more than $40,000 a
year, were angry yesterday as they milled around the Seventh Street headquarters
of Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co., occasionally yelling as a
garbage truck driven by a member of management drove out of the yard.
They talked a little about the issues -- their plea for more money and
earlier retirement -- but what they really wanted to talk about is what
they do for a living.
``I'm up at 2 in the morning,'' said Mario, a 35-year-old garbage worker
who, like his mates, did not want his last name used. ``I'm down here from
Sonoma County by 3:30, and by 4 we're out on the street.''
Chuck and Mario and the other drivers and helpers dress in gray pants,
gray shirts, boots, back supports and leather gloves that are thick, but
not thick enough to protect their hands from needles dumped in the trash
by junkies.
Mario carries 19 bunches of keys -- about 1,000 keys in all -- that let
him into dark, dank, rat- riddled stairwells in his route's apartment buildings,
so he can then walk up four or five flights, fill his burlap bag with trash
and take it out to the waiting truck.
On the street, cable car operators and bus drivers are impatient and want
the garbage truck to move. One of the banes of the job is complaints from
residents who, understandably, are not overjoyed by the noise of a garbage
truck at 4 a.m., so their garbage is not picked up until daylight.
Then there's the stuff Chuck and Mario pick up, most of it imaginable,
some not. ``Fish, chickens, dead animals, a butchered goat, a dog's head,''
says Mario. ``Once we found a guy -- dead guy -- wrapped up in duct tape.
Rats? Common. All over the place.''
Lest this job appear to be monotonous, the garbage collectors, like teachers
or ski instructors, like to point out the seasonal nature of their work.
``At Halloween,'' Chuck says, ``everyone throws out pumpkins. If it's new
phone book month, they throw out all their old phone books. At Thanksgiving,
you get the turkey carcasses; at Christmas, the Christmas trees; at New
Year's, the bottles; and when it's raining, everything is soaked and it's
twice as heavy.''
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